Students storm concert for The Cataracts and Mac Miller from The Statesman on Vimeo. Shot by Deanna Del Ciello and Anusha Mookherjee. Edited by Basil John.
It was not a jog—it was not a run.
It was a storm of Seawolves at the Staller Steps on Saturday at the Undergraduate Student Government’s second annual Back to the Brook concert featuring The Cataracs and headliner Mac Miller.
At 5:15 p.m., about 45 minutes after the concert had already started, students waiting to get into the concert charged the Staller Steps. The show came to a halt for almost 20 minutes. Students who were already at the front of the stage pushed forward as part of what seemed like a collective effort to see the headlining performer.
“I’m kind of pissed because we’re going to get the blame on Monday but we tried to prevent all of this from happening,” USG Vice President of Communications Mario Ferone said of the students rushing Staller Steps. “We wanted more event management. We wanted more police barriers.”
Students had started forming lines to get into the concert well before 4 p.m., with lines starting at the Staller Center, stretching down the academic mall, around Psychology A and into the parking lot behind it. When the concert started at 4:30 p.m., hundreds of students had yet to go through a university pat down checking for illegal substances.
“We didn’t know that the process for getting in would take so long,” Ferone said. “We wanted more event management to help the line so people wouldn’t cut,” but Concert Security Services “were like ‘No, you don’t need that.’”
Ferone said that campus security has a meeting every week and that the concert would probably be a topic at the upcoming briefing. When it comes time for the spring concert, he said they will probably discuss a way to enforce police barriers to prevent another student rush.
Director of Student Life Anthony LaViscount, USG president Adil Hussain and members of the University Police Department took the stage when the music stopped. Concert officials agreed to let the students who had not gone through the security check to stay on the steps.
However, the concert could only start again if a few conditions were met.
“The official word from security is that if you don’t move back in 10 minutes, the concert is canceled,” Hussain said to the crowd from the stage. “You’re all in college—you can handle this.”
About seven minutes later, the crowd seemed set in their original spots. After approximately 10 more minutes, Hussain told the crowd that if anybody crossed or fell by accident over the new police barricades, the show would stop permanently.
“I think there are so many ignorant college kids that, you know, are fresh out of high school, so they aren’t used to this environment,” Laura Matel, a freshman biology major, said.
“I’m just aggravated,” Nick Vitale, an undeclared sophomore, said. “It depends on how everyone cooperates,” he said when asked if he thought the concert would resume.
The concert did resume about 20 minutes after its initial stop.
“At least nothing bad happened—I mean that happened but it could have been worse,” Ferone said.